Barth

Karl Barth (1886–1968)

Message

God is God, and the world is not. The difference is not a very large difference of degree. It is infinite and qualitative. Religion, ethics, and experience do not climb to Him; they are what the Word judges. The Gospel is not one truth among truths. It sets a question mark against all truths. Faith is not a religious capacity. It is the void in which God acts. Sin is the impossibility that man is anyway: the attempt to be judge in his own case, to take God’s place. After the liberal nineteenth century, theology’s first word is No—to natural theology, to culture-Protestantism, to any analogia entis that would make God and creature instances of one being. The second word, and the one the Church Dogmatics exists to say, is Yes: God’s Yes in Jesus Christ, election as grace rather than as an abstract decree about a hidden God.

Content

The Epistle to the Romans, second edition (1922), is the bomb: expressionist commentary, Kierkegaard in the margins, the wholly other. The Barmen Declaration (1934) is the political form of the same No. Church Dogmatics (1932–1967, unfinished) is the long retrieval: Trinity, election, creation, reconciliation, all read from Christ outward, so that the God of the crisis does not remain a mere negation.

Presentation

The commentary shouts. The Dogmatics accumulates, paragraph on paragraph, small print as a second river of argument. He writes as a church theologian who has decided that the sermon, not the seminar, was the place the nineteenth century failed.

Method

Biblical actualism. God is known where God speaks, not where man extends a concept. Dialectic in the early work—every human position negated—gives way to a Christological concentration in which the No is inside the Yes. Kierkegaard supplies the infinite difference; Paul supplies the text; liberalism supplies the enemy.

Summary

Pascal’s God who is not the philosophers’ God becomes a rule for an entire theology. Sin is not a pessimism about morals. It is the creature’s impossibility of being its own ground, exposed by revelation rather than by introspection.

What shaped him

People: Wilhelm Herrmann, then the break with him; Kierkegaard; Eduard Thurneysen; his brother Heinrich. Place: Basel; the pastorate at Safenwil; Bonn, then expulsion; Basel again. Formative experiences: the failure of his teachers’ Christianity to withstand 1914, when they endorsed the Kaiser’s war; the village sermon, where liberal ethics had nothing to say to miners and the bereaved; the Barmen synod against the German Christians. Cultural events: the First World War as the collapse of culture-Protestantism; the Third Reich as the test of whether the Church would hear another word beside Christ’s.

Quotes

“God is God.”

“The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths.”

There is an “infinite qualitative difference” between God and man.

“Faith is awe in the presence of the divine incognito.”

Religion is the “highest human possibility,” and for that reason the crisis of man, not his bridge.

“Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” (Barmen I)